As long as we’re happily doing the blog thing – me writing and you reading; hello? HELLO!! – perhaps it would be well to think a little about what a good blog requires.

An interesting topic. That sounds right, but in fact it’s not very helpful. Every blog has an interesting topic, at least to its author. More often than not, it is the author who is the topic, and you just can’t get any more interesting than that if you are that person. But we are thinking about the commentary blogs, the thoughtful ones, aren’t we?

An interesting style. I suppose the same comment would apply here. “Yes, Dear Reader, I simply adore my own writing style. You ought to.”

Point of view. It’s hard to imagine a blogger not having one of these, though it may not be very well thought out or clearly conveyed or useful. Some bloggers I have read have several, and their blogs aren’t any the better for it.

This doesn’t seem to be getting us very far.

Eugene Volokh, a blogger whose site I read regularly, explained recently why there are certain topics on which he had not written:

As I’ve noted before, there are lots of things I don’t blog about because I know little about them, I find them difficult, and they’re quite important. Since I know little about them, I’m not sure I have much to add (but I have lots of opportunities to screw up). Since they’re difficult, I don’t think I can just give a quick answer from general principles. And since they’re important, there’s a good deal at stake in getting it right: An off-hand comment that might be right or might be wrong might cut it for a trivia question, but not for important issues.

This is admirable, I think. Here we see evidence of care, prudence, and responsibility, three virtues that are not always very easy to find in the online world, or in the real one, for that matter.

Perhaps we might start over with the bloggish virtues:

Candor. Perhaps you have noticed, as I have, that of the things about which we are certain – I mean, just flat-out certain – with respect to a certain proportion we turn out to be wrong anyway. If you are like me, you find that that proportion is higher than you’d like it to be. That being the case, why would either of us do anything to raise that proportion, such as pretending to be certain about things we’re not sure of? Three of the hardest words to pronounce in the English language are “I don’t know.” Practice them.

Firmness. This is the countervailing virtue to candor. Just because a critic says you are wrong doesn’t make it so. You stick to your guns until it has reasonably and rationally been shown that you are wrong.

Point. Not point of view, but point: some overall guiding principle or reason for blogging. In my case, I’m interested in writing about knowing – what we know, what we can know, how we know it, what happens when whoops! we didn’t know it after all, all that sort of thing.